Marge Piercy: Poems Literary Elements

The poem The Air Smelled Dirty is written as a narrative recollection of the poet's hometown. It is written from the first person perspective as the poet mentions 'my father,' yet she narrates events from a distance, emphasizing the memory element, as she uses the third person narration in the past tense: 'Everyone burned coal.'

The Air Smelled Dirty is written in four regular quintets.

The simile, 'the fire glowed like a red eye,' in The Air Smelled Dirty provokes an image of heat as well as identifying the physical color and appearance of the fire in furnace. It also personifies the fire, giving it monster-like qualities as it seems to watch 'through the furnace door.' Furthermore, it could be interpreted as giving the furnace itself a human-like feature of an eye, therefore personifying the machine.

The alliteration of 'my Welsh cousins dug it down in the dark,' in The Air Smelled Dirty allows the digging of coal to be visually replicated for the reader, as the rhythms of digging and the dark color of the coal, as well as the setting of the scene, 'in the dark,' becomes a sensory rather than simply descriptive scene through this alliteration.

The cats narrated voice in direct speech, 'we are friends, says the cat, although I am more equal,' in the poem The cat's song presents the irony in a cat's feelings and relationship with their owner.

The poem More Than Enough is a nature poem.

The poem The Air Smelled Dirty is set in the poet Marge Piercy's 'neighborhood,' which may be near 'the mountains of western Pennsylvania.' The majority of the scenes take place in the basement, but there is also mention of the 'mornings,' that she remembers.

In The Air Smelled Dirty the tone is reflective and somewhat melancholic.

The protagonist in The cat's song is 'the cat,' yet it also has some antagonistic qualities.

The underlying major conflict in the poem The Friend seems to be the tense, controlling nature of the relationship between the speaker and their friend.

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In the poem Ne'ilah, the opening 'the hinge of the year/ the great gates opening and then slowly slowly closing on us,' foreshadows the changes within the poem and the tone of urgency.

The line 'I sing to you in the mornings walking round and round your bed and into your face,' is an understatement in the poem The cat's song since it is a simple statement that shows the selfish, demanding and annoying habits of the cat underneath its surface level as a description of the cat's movements.

In the poem Toad dreams, Piercy refers to Henry Thoreau and quotes his lines about 'the dream of the toads,' to show the inspiration for this poem.

In the poem Toads dreams, 'what we consider lesser life,' refers to animals and smaller creatures.

Marge Piercy in The Air Smelled Dirty uses personification in the last lines of the poem to describe the difference between the machines in her home and the threatening nature of the furnace: 'the washing machine was tame but the furnace was always hungry.' The contrast between the adjectives 'tame' and 'hungry,' shows that the hunger of the furnace must be constantly fed and is wild and uncontrollable in nature.

The line 'Birds are greedy little bombs bursting to give voice to appetite,' is an exaggeration of the birds calling because they are hungry and gives a much more threatening and violent tone to this imagery.

When Marge Piercy relays that 'the clinkers fell loud,' and 'it was my job to pull out the clinkers and carry them to the alley bin,' the onomatopoeia of the noun 'clinkers,' describes its sound, so the reader can imagine this job and scene well.